In this powerful speech at the Munich Security Conference, JD Vance emphasizes the urgent need for Europe to embrace its foundational democratic values. Reflecting on his experiences in Germany and the ongoing challenges facing Europe, he highlights the risks of censorship, the dangers of disregarding citizens' voices, and the critical importance of democratic mandates in securing a prosperous and free future. Vance urges European leaders to listen to their people, offering a passionate defense of liberty, free speech, and the rights of voters. Watch as Vance shares his vision for a more resilient and united Europe in the face of growing internal and external challenges.
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00:00Well, thank you. And thanks to all the gathered delegates and luminaries and media professionals.
00:07And thanks especially to the host of the Munich Security Conference for being able to put on such an incredible event.
00:14We're, of course, thrilled to be here. We're happy to be here.
00:17And one of the things that I wanted to talk about today is, of course, our shared values.
00:24And it's great to be back in Germany, as you heard earlier.
00:28I was here last year as a United States senator.
00:30I saw Foreign Secretary David Lamey and joked that both of us last year had different jobs than we have now.
00:37But now it's time for all of our countries, for all of those who have been fortunate enough to be given political power by our respective peoples,
00:46to use it wisely to improve their lives.
00:48And I want to say that I was fortunate in my time here to spend some time outside the walls of this conference over the last 24 hours.
00:57And I've been so impressed by the hospitality of the people, even, of course, as they're reeling from yesterday's horrendous attack.
01:06And the first time I was ever in Munich was with my wife, actually, who's here with me today on a personal trip.
01:13And I've always loved the city of Munich, and I've always loved its people.
01:17And I just want to say that we're very moved.
01:19And our thoughts and prayers are with Munich and everybody affected by the evil and inflicted on this beautiful community.
01:26We're thinking about you.
01:27We're praying for you.
01:28And we will certainly be rooting for you in the days and weeks to come.
01:33Now, thank you.
01:39I hope that's not the last bit of applause that I get.
01:42But we gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security.
01:48And normally we mean threats to our external security.
01:52I see many great military leaders gathered here today.
01:56But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine,
02:07and we also believe that it's important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense,
02:14the threat that I worry the most about vis-Ć -vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor.
02:22And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.
02:34Now, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election.
02:46He warned that if things don't go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.
02:53Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears.
02:59We've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.
03:06Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy.
03:14But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others,
03:21we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.
03:26And I say ourselves because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.
03:30We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them.
03:36Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent.
03:47And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections.
03:56Were they the good guys? Certainly not.
03:59And thank God they lost the Cold War.
04:02They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty.
04:08The freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.
04:14As it turns out, you can't mandate innovation or creativity just as you can't force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.
04:23And we believe those things are certainly connected.
04:26And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it's sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War's winners.
04:36I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote, hateful content.
04:50Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, combating misogyny on the internet a day of action.
05:04I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend's murder.
05:16And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden's laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant, and I'm quoting, a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
05:34And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs.
05:46A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.
06:04Not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.
06:11After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.
06:24Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person's decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
06:39He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
06:44Now I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.
06:53But no, this last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.
07:10Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime.
07:17In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
07:23And in the interest of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe but from within my own country.
07:36Where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.
07:43Misinformation like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China, our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.
08:00So I come here today not just with an observation but with an offer.
08:05And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.
08:17In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town.
08:20And under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.
08:36Now we're at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election.
08:46Based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.
08:53Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections.
09:02But I'd ask my European friends to have some perspective.
09:06You can believe it's wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections.
09:12We certainly do.
09:13You can condemn it on the world stage even.
09:16But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn't very strong to begin with.
09:26Now, the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.
09:37And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still.
09:44Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations.
09:56Now, again, we don't have to agree with everything or anything that people say.
10:02But when people represent, when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.
10:14Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or, even worse, win an election.
10:40Now, this is a security conference, and I'm sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years in line with some new target.
10:51And that's great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent.
11:01We don't think, you hear this term, burden sharing, but we think it's an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.
11:14But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don't know what it is that we are defending in the first place?
11:27I've heard a lot already in my conversations, and I've had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room.
11:34I've heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that's important.
11:39But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you're defending yourselves for.
11:49What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?
11:57And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.
12:09Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making.
12:22If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.
12:28Nor for that matter is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.
12:35You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.
12:40In the coming years have we learned nothing that thin mandates produce unstable results, but there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens.
12:57If you're going to enjoy competitive economies, if you're going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern.
13:07Because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things, and of course we know that very well in America.
13:14You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail.
13:19Whether that's the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news.
13:27Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.
13:35And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration.
13:46Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad.
13:51That is, of course, an all-time high.
13:53It's a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all-time high.
13:57The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone, and of course it's gotten much higher since.
14:07And we know this situation, it didn't materialize in a vacuum.
14:12It's the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent and others across the world over the span of a decade.
14:24We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city.
14:30And of course I can't bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined.
14:39Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them, but why did this happen in the first place?
14:45It's a terrible story, but it's one we've heard way too many times in Europe and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well.
14:53An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community.
15:04How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?
15:14No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.
15:23But you know what they did vote for?
15:25In England they voted for Brexit, and agree or disagree, they voted for it.
15:30And more and more all over Europe they're voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration.
15:37Now I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don't have to agree with me.
15:42I just think that people care about their homes, they care about their dreams, they care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.
15:52And they're smart.
15:54I think this is one of the most important things I've learned in my brief time in politics.
15:59Contrary to what you might hear a couple mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don't generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy.
16:12And it's hardly surprising that they don't want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders.
16:19And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.
16:25I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing.
16:39In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.
16:44And speaking up and expressing opinions isn't election interference, even when people express views outside your own country and even when those people are very influential.
16:56And trust me, I say this with all humor, if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg's scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
17:08But what German democracy, what no democracy, American, German, or European will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.
17:26Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters.
17:32There's no room for firewalls.
17:36You either uphold the principle or you don't.
17:40Europeans, the people, have a voice.
17:44European leaders have a choice.
17:47And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.
17:53You can embrace what your people tell you, even when it's surprising, even when you don't agree.
17:59And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you.
18:06And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy.
18:10It's not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels.
18:13It's not even in the great institutions that we have built together as a shared society.
18:18To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice.
18:27And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little.
18:34As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said,
18:43do not be afraid.
18:46We shouldn't be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.
18:52Thank you all. Good luck to all of you.
18:55God bless you.